“Leon Gott wasn’t hiking or camping,” said Crowe. “He was killed in his own garage.”
“Perhaps to steal that leopard pelt,” said Zucker. “It’s this killer’s totemic symbol, to be used for ritual purposes.”
Frost said, “We know Gott bragged about the snow leopard in online hunting forums. He announced to everyone that he was commissioned to work on one of the rarest animals on earth.”
“Which again points to a hunter as your suspect. It makes sense, both symbolically and practically. This killer identifies with leopards, nature’s most perfect hunter. He’s also comfortable in the wild. But unlike other hunters, his quarry isn’t deer or elk; he chooses humans. Hikers or outdoorsmen. It’s the ultimate challenge, and he favors wilderness areas to stalk his prey. The mountains of Nevada. The Maine woods. Montana.”
“Botswana,” said Jane softly.
Zucker frowned at her. “Pardon?”
“Leon Gott’s son vanished in Botswana. He was with a group of tourists on safari in a remote area.”
At the mention of Elliot Gott, Maura’s pulse jolted into a gallop. “Just like the backpackers. Just like the hunters,” she said. “They go into the wild, and they’re never seen again.” Patterns. It’s all about seeing the patterns. She looked at Jane. “If Elliot Gott was one of his victims, that means this killer was stalking prey six years ago.”
Jane nodded. “In Africa.”
THE ELECTRONIC FILE HAD been sitting in Jane’s laptop for days, sent to her from the Interpol National Central Bureau for Botswana. It was nearly a hundred pages long and contained reports from the Botswana Police Service in Maun, the South African Police Service, and the Johannesburg branch of Interpol. When she’d first received the file, she’d been unconvinced of its relevance to Leon Gott’s murder six years later, and had only skimmed through it. But the disappearance of the hikers in Nevada and the hunters in Montana had unsettling parallels to Elliot Gott’s doomed safari, and now she settled down at her desk and clicked open the file. As phones rang in the homicide unit and Frost noisily crinkled sandwich wrappers at his desk, Jane once again read the file, but this time more carefully.
The report from Interpol contained a concise summary of the events and the investigation. On August 20 six years ago, seven tourists from four different countries boarded a bush plane in Maun, Botswana, and flew into the Okavango Delta. They were dropped off at a remote airstrip, where they were met by their bush guide and his tracker, both from South Africa. The safari would bring them deep into the Delta, where they would camp at a different location each night, traveling by truck, sleeping in tents, eating wild game. The bush guide’s website promised a “true wilderness adventure in one of the last remaining Edens on earth.”
For six of those seven unfortunate tourists, the adventure had been a journey into oblivion.
Jane clicked to the next page, a list of the known victims, their nationalities, and whether the remains had been recovered.
Sylvia Van Ofwegen (South Africa). Missing, presumed dead. No remains found.
Vivian Kruiswyk (South Africa). Deceased. Partial remains recovered, confirmed by DNA.
Elliot Gott (USA). Missing, presumed dead. No remains found.
Isao Matsunaga (Japan). Deceased, remains found buried at campsite. Confirmed by DNA.
Keiko Matsunaga (Japan). Missing, presumed dead. No remains found.
Richard Renwick (UK). Missing, presumed dead. No remains found.
Clarence Nghobo (South Africa). Deceased. Partial remains recovered. Confirmed by DNA.
She was about to click to the next page when she suddenly paused, her eye on one particular name on that victim list. A name that stirred a faint memory. Why did it seem familiar? She struggled to retrieve the image it conjured up. Saw, in her mind’s eye, another list, with the same name.
She swiveled around to Frost, who was happily devouring his usual turkey sandwich. “You have the Brandon Tyrone file from Maine?”
“Yeah.”
“Have you read it yet?”
“Yeah. Not much more to it than what Detective Barber told us.”
“There was a list of stolen items they found stashed in Tyrone’s garage. Can I see it again?”
Frost set down the sandwich and picked through the stack of files on his desk. “Don’t remember anything worth noting on it. Few cameras. Credit cards and an iPod …”
“Wasn’t there a silver cigarette lighter?”
“Yeah.” He pulled out a folder and handed it to her. “So?”
She flipped through the file until she found the list of items that Brandon Tyrone and Nick Thibodeau had stolen from tents and cars at the Maine campground. Scanning down the list, she came to the item she’d remembered. Cigarette lighter, sterling silver. Engraved with name: R. Renwick. She looked at her laptop. At the names of the victims in Botswana.
Richard Renwick (UK). Missing, presumed dead.
“Holy shit,” she said, and reached for the phone.
“What is it?” said Frost.
“Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.” She punched in a phone number.
After three rings a voice answered: “Detective Barber.”
“Hey, it’s Jane Rizzoli, Boston PD. You know that file you gave us on Brandon Tyrone’s murder? There’s a list of items that you recovered from Tyrone’s garage.”
“Yeah. The stuff he and Nick stole from the campground.”
“Did you track down the owners of all these items?”
“Most of them. The credit cards, stuff with names attached were easy. After the news broke that we’d recovered stolen goods from the campground, a few other owners filed claims.”
“I’m interested in one item in particular. A sterling silver lighter with a name engraved on it.”
Barber said, without hesitation: “Nope. Never found the owner.”
“You’re sure no one claimed it?”
“Yep. I interviewed everyone who came in to claim property, just in case they’d witnessed something at the campground. Maybe saw Nick and Tyrone at the scene. No one ever came for the lighter, which surprised me. It’s sterling silver. Someone obviously paid a lot of money for it.”
“Did you try tracking down the name engraved on it? R. Renwick?”
Barber laughed. “Try doing a Google search on R. Renwick. You’ll turn up about twenty thousand results. All we could do was put it out on the news and hope the owner would call us. Maybe he didn’t hear about it. Maybe he never noticed he’d lost it.” Barber paused. “Why’re you asking about the lighter?”
“That name, R. Renwick. It turned up in another case. A victim, named Richard Renwick.”
“Which case?”
“Multiple murders, six years ago. In Botswana.”
“Africa?” Barber snorted. “That’s a stretch. Don’t you think the name’s more likely to be a coincidence?”
Maybe, thought Jane as she hung up. Or maybe it was the one thing that tied all these cases together. Six years ago, Richard Renwick was murdered in Africa. A year later, a cigarette lighter with the name R. Renwick turned up in Maine. Did it come to the US in a killer’s pocket?
“You want to tell me what’s going on?” said Frost as she dialed the phone again.
“I need to track someone down.”
He looked over her shoulder at the page displayed on her laptop. “The Botswana file? What does it have to do with—”
She held up a hand to silence him as she heard her husband’s usual brusque greeting. “Gabriel Dean.”
“Hey, Mr. Special Agent. Can you do me a favor?”
“Let me guess,” he said with a laugh. “We’re out of milk.”
“No, I need you to put on your Bureau cap. I want to find someone, and I have no idea where in the world she is. You’ve got that buddy at Interpol, in South Africa. Henk something.”
“Henk Andriessen.”
“Yeah, maybe he can help me.”
“This is an international case?”
>
“Multiple murders in Botswana. I told you about it. Those tourists who vanished on safari. The problem is, it’s been six years and I’m not sure where this person is now. I’m guessing she’s back in London.”
“What’s her name?”
“Millie Jacobson. The sole survivor.”
TWENTY-FOUR
SOUTH AFRICA
EVERY MORNING FOR THE PAST FIVE DAYS, A CARMINE BEE-EATER HAS been visiting the bottlebrush tree. Even as I step into my back garden with a cup of coffee, the bird sits unruffled, a bright red ornament perched among the cheerful tangle of shrubs and flowers. I have worked hard on this garden, digging and composting, weeding and watering, transforming what was once a patch of scrub into my own private retreat. But on this warm November day, I scarcely register the summery blooms or the visiting bee-eater. Last night’s phone call has left me too shaken to think of anything else.
Christopher comes out to join me, and wrought iron scrapes across the patio stones as he sits down with his coffee at the garden table. “What are you going to do?” he asks.
I breathe in the scent of flowers and focus on the trellis, gloriously engulfed by vines. “I don’t want to go.”
“So you’ve decided.”
“Yes.” I sigh. “No.”
“I can handle this for you. I’ll tell them to leave you alone. You’ve answered all their questions, so what more can they expect?”
“A little courage, maybe,” I whisper.
“Good God, Millie. You’re the bravest woman I know.”
That makes me laugh, because I don’t feel brave at all. I feel like a quivering mouse afraid to leave this home where I’ve felt so safe. I don’t want to leave because I know what’s out there in the world. I know who is out there, and my hands shake at the mere thought of seeing him again. But that is what she’s asking me to do, that policewoman who called from Boston. You know his face. You know how he thinks and how he hunts. We need you to help us catch him.
Before he kills again.
Christopher reaches across the table to grasp my hands. Only then do I notice how cold I am. How warm he is. “You had the nightmare last night, didn’t you?”
“You noticed.”
“It’s not hard when I’m sleeping right next to you.”
“I haven’t had the dream in months. I thought I was over it.”
“That bloody phone call,” he mutters. “You know they don’t have anything solid. It’s just their theory. They could be looking for someone else entirely.”
“They found Richard’s lighter.”
“You can’t be sure it’s the same lighter.”
“Another R. Renwick?”
“It’s a common enough name. Anyway, if it is the same lighter, it means the killer’s far away. He’s moved on, to a different continent.”
Which is why I want to stay here, where Johnny can’t find me. I’d be insane to go in search of a monster. I drain my coffee cup and stand, the chair squealing across the stones. I don’t know what I was thinking, buying wrought-iron garden furniture. Perhaps it was the sense of permanence, the feeling that I could always count on it to last, but the chairs are heavy and hard to move. As I walk back into the house I feel as if I’m hauling yet another burden, heavy as wrought iron, fear-forged and anchoring me to this place. I go to the sink to wash cups and saucers, and tidy up a countertop that is already pristine.
You know how he thinks. And how he hunts.
An image of Johnny Posthumus’s face suddenly rears up in my mind, as real as if he’s standing right outside my kitchen, staring through the window. I flinch and a spoon clatters to the floor. He’s always there, haunting me, just a stray thought away. After I left Botswana, I felt certain he would one day track me down. I’m the only one who lived through it, the one witness he couldn’t kill. Surely that’s a challenge he can’t ignore. But the months became years and I heard nothing from either the Botswana or the South African police, and I began to hope that Johnny was dead. That his bones lie scattered somewhere in the wilderness, like Richard’s. Like the others’. That was the only way I could feel safe again, by imagining him dead. These past six years, no one has seen or heard from him, so it was reasonable to believe he’d met his end and couldn’t hurt me.
The call from Boston changes everything.
Footsteps thump lightly down the stairs and our daughter Violet comes dancing into the kitchen. At four years old, she’s still fearless because we have lied to her. We’ve told her the world is a place of peace and light and she does not know that monsters are real. Christopher scoops her into his arms, swirls her around, and carries her laughing into the living room for their Saturday-morning ritual of cartoons. The dishes are washed, the coffeepot rinsed, and everything is as it should be, but I pace the kitchen looking for new tasks, anything to distract me.
I sit down at the computer and see a batch of emails that have popped into my inbox since last night, from my sister in London, from the other mothers in Violet’s playgroup, from some Nigerian who wants to wire a fortune into my bank account, if only I will give him my number.
And there’s one from Detective Jane Rizzoli in Boston. It was sent last night, barely an hour after our phone conversation.
I hesitate to open it, already sensing that this is the point of no return. Once I cross this line, I cannot retreat behind my solid wall of denial. In the next room, Christopher and Violet are laughing at cartoon mayhem while here I sit, my heart pounding, my hand frozen.
I click the mouse. I might as well have lit the fuse on a stick of dynamite, because what shows up on my screen hits me like an explosion. It is a photograph of the sterling silver cigarette lighter that the police found in a bag of stolen goods in Maine. I see the name R. RENWICK, in the Engraver’s Bold font that Richard liked so much. But it’s the scratch that rivets my gaze. Though faint, it is clearly there, like a single claw mark marring the gloss, slicing across the top of the R. I think of the day it happened, the day it fell out of Richard’s pocket in London and hit the pavement. I think of how often I saw him use that lighter, and how pleased he was when I presented it to him on his birthday. Such a vain and pretentious gift that he’d requested, but that was Richard, always wanting to mark his territory, even if that territory is a shiny bit of sterling silver. I remember how he used it to light his Gauloises by the campfire, and the smart click of it snapping shut.
I have no doubt this lighter is indeed his. Somehow the lighter made its way out of the Okavango Delta, carried in a killer’s pocket, and across the ocean to America. Now they are asking me to follow in his footsteps.
I read the message that Detective Rizzoli sent along with the photo. Is this the same lighter? If so, we urgently need to discuss this further. Will you come to Boston?
The sun shines brightly outside my kitchen window and my garden is at its glorious summer best. In Boston, winter is approaching and I imagine it is chilly and gray, even grayer than London. She has no idea what she’s asking of me. She says she knows the facts of what happened, but facts are cold, bloodless things, like bits of metal welded together into a statue, but missing a soul. She can’t possibly understand what I went through in the Delta.
I take a deep breath and type my response. I’m sorry. I can’t go to Boston.
TWENTY-FIVE
AS A MARINE, GABRIEL HAD ACQUIRED MORE THAN A FEW SURVIVAL skills, and one of the skills that Jane envied was her husband’s ability to quickly snatch a few precious hours of sleep whenever the opportunity presented itself. Minutes after the flight attendants dimmed the cabin lights, he reclined his seat, closed his eyes, and dropped off straight into dreamland. Jane sat wide awake, counting the hours until landing, and thinking about Millie Jacobson.
The sole survivor of the doomed safari was not back in London, as Jane had assumed, but was now living in a small town in South Africa’s Hex River Valley. After two nightmarish weeks fighting to survive in the bush, caked in mud and eating nothing but reeds and grass,
the London-bred bookseller hadn’t returned to the city, but had chosen to settle on the same continent that had nearly killed her.
The photos of Millie Jacobson after she’d emerged from the bush made it clear just how hewn to the bone she’d become by the end of her ordeal. Her UK passport photo had shown a dark-haired young woman with blue eyes and a heart-shaped face, pleasantly ordinary, neither pretty nor plain. The photo taken in the hospital during her recovery was of a woman so transformed that Jane could scarcely believe it was the same person. Somewhere in the wild, what had once been Millie Jacobson was cast off like snakeskin, to reveal a bony, sun-blackened creature with haunted eyes.
While everyone else on the plane seemed to be sleeping, Jane once again reviewed the police file of the Botswana safari murders. At the time there’d been substantial publicity in the UK about the case, where Richard Renwick was a popular thriller novelist. In the United States he was not well known and Jane had never read his books, which were described in the London Times as “action-packed” and “testosterone-driven.” The Times article focused almost entirely on Renwick, devoting only two paragraphs to his live-in girlfriend Millie Jacobson. But it was Millie who now captured Jane’s full attention, and she stared transfixed at the Interpol file photo of the young woman. It had been taken soon after the ordeal, and in Millie’s face Jane saw a reflection of herself not that many years ago. Both of them had been touched by the cold hand of a killer, and survived. That touch was something you never forgot.
She and Gabriel had left Boston on a day of wind-driven sleet and rain, and the weather during their brief stopover in London had been no less gray and wintry. So it was a shock to walk off the plane hours later, into the summery warmth of Cape Town. Here the seasons seemed upside down, and in an airport where everyone else was garbed in shorts and sleeveless dresses, Jane was still wearing the turtleneck and wool sweater that she’d donned in Boston. By the time they claimed their luggage and walked out of immigration, she was sweltering and desperate to strip down to her tank top.
The Rizzoli & Isles Series 11-Book Bundle Page 332
